Fort Schuyler is our forte

Greetings to one and all! My name is Felicia Berke, and I’m the Library Coordinator at SUNY Maritime, which will be your host for the 2007 SUNYLA Conference. I’ve been working with Carol Anne for the last few months, and we’ve been moving right along making arrangements. I volunteered to be a blogger, figuring I can tell you about each and every brick we polish in anticipation of your arrival. Doesn't that sound like fun reading? No, that's not what I'm going to ramble on about. I thought that my perspective would be rather different from other conference bloggers. Whether that's because I'm the local planning point person or because this will be my first conference as an attendee, let alone as a member of the hosting staff, or because most of my posts will probably be pre-conference, or because I'm my own unique snowflake, I really couldn't say. Whatever the reason, I'm happy to keep you in the loop.

Now down to business.

Rosanne Humes from Nassau Community College has volunteered to handle the registrations. To encourage early registration, I'm working on securing some tickets to a Broadway show or a Yankee game, something like that. We're hoping because of our campus's proximity to New York City that conference attendees will choose to come early or stay late to spend a few days exploring the area.

The Maritime librarians met last week about the conference for the first time, and they seem to be very excited about taking on whatever I give them to help plan a (pardon the non-professional phrasing here) truly kick-ass conference. They're also bubbling over with presentation ideas, so we'll see what we can teach everybody about a life at sea, or at the very least, how to read about a life at sea with the assistance of our very favorite resource, the campus library. Or something like that.

As for what our local committee is planning, I want to keep some surprises so I won't specify what, but I can say that we've begun tracking down some goodies.

More news as I know it.